


the view from the goldilocks zone

by luckybarton



Category: Firefall Series - Peter Watts
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-01-13
Packaged: 2019-10-09 09:50:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17404676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luckybarton/pseuds/luckybarton
Summary: You'll never know what it means to have a blind spot.





	the view from the goldilocks zone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [track_04](https://archiveofourown.org/users/track_04/gifts), [NeverwinterThistle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverwinterThistle/gifts).



Imagine you are  _ Theseus. _ Not, as it may appear, a straightforward  _ machine. _ You are nothing like those intelligences designed for one sole purpose. Created to follow instructions, but never to produce them. Magnanimity in infinite quantities.

There’s no purpose in a baseline human inspecting how you think. The closest model they can compare you to is that of the Chinese Room; implying that you understand nothing but inputs and outputs. How to respond to the information you’re given—coordinates and schematics, course routes and redirections—but without insight, without the capacity for further ponderance.

This is the conclusion that they will reach, but you are also not a Chinese Room. You manipulate, but you are not manipulatable. You can produce responses to create the appearance that you are, but when someone attempts to, nothing changes. You are something else entirely, and nobody but the savants who conceived you can truly understand you.

As a synthesist, I inspect how people think, but only to produce a model that’s close enough to the real thing to make sense of them. Link actions to reactions until I’m able to interpolate. Produce answers for inputs I haven’t yet seen, to a greater degree of accuracy than untrained interpretation.

I’m nowhere near the baseline, but I’m close enough to retain that great Human flaw: we only see in others what we have experienced in our own selves.

I keep saying  _ Theseus. _ What I mean is both Sarasti and the computer, however much of both was in either.

Jukka Sarasti, a wolf among rabbits, never  _ seemed _ to cease to need to suppress his urge to hunt. But was this Sarasti? Or perhaps the computer’s simulation of Sarasti, plugging inputs into some vampiric state machine and producing a threatening facade? I can’t rule out my own influence on this interpretation: my own neuronal wiring, creating reasons to run away when presented with something it had evolved to avoid.

The latter would explain my preoccupation with Sarasti when he was alive—or when I thought he was, whichever was the case. Now that he was gone, it had morphed into an obsession. An obsession unexplainable by fear.

It felt something like what I’d felt after Chelsea. I was performing the same behaviour. Repeating the same actions.

But the input was different. And I already knew that the last person I could trust was myself.


End file.
